


with your love

by intrajanelle



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Romance, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-18
Updated: 2013-03-19
Packaged: 2017-12-05 17:48:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/726095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrajanelle/pseuds/intrajanelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of vignettes cataloguing the weeks after Wally’s death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Still not over Endgame.

Artemis can still remember the simulation. She can still remember the feeling of being pulled apart and burned molecule by molecule until every constituent of her is reduced to flakes of ash floating on an arctic wind. Sometimes when she closes her eyes she can still feel her flesh being melted from her bones. She wonders if that’s how Wally felt. She hopes it wasn’t painful and that it was over quickly, but some twisted part of her hidden under layers of mourning and denial wonders if she set herself on fire she would get the same effect as a hundred thousand volts of kinetic energy.

She sits in her kitchen in Palo Alto, flicking a zippo open and closed, open and closed, open and closed, until Brucely pats into the kitchen and rests his nose in her lap. Only then does she set the zippo on the counter and fold her arms over her head.

*

One morning, three days after Wally left her an empty apartment, a dog and a single unanswered text message that said nothing but ‘coffee pls <3’ Artemis woke up, walked into her bathroom with a pair of scissors and cut her hair. She was momentarily horrified as she snipped a piece so short that it flopped just under her ear but then she took to the task with rapture, hacking at the long blonde strands as if weeding congested sadness from her mind. 

When Zatanna stopped by at two with a tray of lasagna she took one look at Artemis’ head and gently sat her in the kitchen. The girl produced a pair of professional hair-cutting scissors from somewhere among her person and began to cut the mess into even layers. She held up a mirror for Artemis to see when she was done but Artemis couldn’t be bothered. 

She sat at the kitchen table, folded in an afghan, picking at a plate of food Zatanna placed before her for two hours until Z finally kissed her on the forehead, cleaned her apartment with a whispered ‘naelc’ and left. 

Artemis found herself curled on her couch the next morning with freshly cut hair tickling her cheeks. 

*

She tries to remember the last thing Wally said to her but all she remembers is a blur of yellow and red and, “Where’s Wally?” and the ice on her kneecaps as she sank to the ground.

*

Artemis didn’t think there could be something worse than Wally disintegrating before her eyes. There was. 

There was Garfield’s face when she kneeled beside him and told him Wally was gone. There was Garfield’s fists, pummeling Nightwing’s chest as he cried, “You promised a year. No more faking anyone’s deaths for a year!” There was the boy’s choked sobs as he clutched Artemis’ hand, refusing to let go lest she disappear too (again).

There was a faint plea distorted by static when Garfield called her as she sat on her couch in Palo Alto and begged her to come home.

*

The first time Artemis knew something was wrong was the week after Wally ceased and the ham on the second shelf of her fridge disappeared. Brucely was curled on the couch, nose pointed toward the front door as if waiting for Wally to barge in, so he hadn’t touched it. Artemis hadn’t eaten more than a bowl of pho her mother had made her choke down a few days ago, she’d remember eating an entire ham.   
She scanned the apartment, maybe Bart had broken in and had a snack, but then again Bart didn’t seem to be eating much either lately. Her eyes fell on a posti-it note on the counter. It was a heart with a little arrow skewering it. Wally used to leave her notes like this all the time, when he had to leave for class early or when he left to have drinks with friends or when he wanted to say ‘I love you’ without using words. Artemis peeled the note from the counter and stared at it because it hadn’t been there last night or the day before that or the day before that.   
Then she sank to the floor and cried and only stopped when she felt the ghost of a hand on her shoulder. When she looked up no one was there.

*

She moved a few days later, left Wally’s things and her Artemis costume in boxes on the West’s porch and later found herself ensconced on a couch in a warehouse between Garfield and Bart.

She thought about finding her own place until M’gann fixed her with a tight stare and said, “I just don’t think you should be on your own right now.”

She wasn’t on her own though, never.

*

It was a week later, maybe two, Artemis had honestly stopped keeping track of time, when she was skimming the rooftops of Bludhaven. She was alone, snuck out of the warehouse under Nightwing’s and M’gann’s noses like a teenager sneaking out on her parents. Albeit sneaking out on a trained detective and a Martian was a bit harder than sneaking out on a middle-aged parent of any kind.

She swooped from her perch on a fire escape just in time to knock a fairly distracted mugger on the head with the heal of her boot. He went down and didn’t come back up, so Artemis, distracted and proud, didn’t notice his buddy lifting a baseball bat and aiming it for her head.

At this point in her short, tragic life Artemis can’t say she’d have cared if he succeeded in smashing her skull to bits. She was tired, tired of raging against the dying light or whatever equally dorky thing Wally would have come up with if he’d been there.

Just tired.

But in the moment the bat should have collided with her temple and sent her into dizzying unconsciousness there was a soft cold wind that fell on the alley. Artemis turned in time to see the bat twisted from the lackey’s grip and clatter to the pavement. She spun, kicking him once, twice, until he was kneeling and hacking and muttering about ghosts.

There was no one else in the alley but Artemis felt the wind as it caressed her cheek and when she looked upward she realized that for the first time since she’d arrived she could see a single poignant star shining on Bludhaven, visible through the smog. 

*

She arrived at the warehouse that night, pushed past Nightwing before he could say a word and seated herself at Barbara’s bank of computers.

For two days she did nothing more than Google ‘kinetic energy’ and ‘zeta beams’ and ‘teleportation’ until her fingers were bruised and her eyes were sore and Garfield, tired of trying to talk to her, morphed into a kitten and curled into her lap.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ‘All Too Well’ came on Songza today and I was in public and I was just sitting there crying my eyes out, if that gives you guys any perspective on how well I’m handling Endgame. I’m thinking about writing this from Wally’s POV to cover more of the Speed Force issue but I’m crying too much to do it at this point. Also gonna edit this someday. Someday.

She might be going crazy, but if going crazy entails the ghost of freckled fingers on her skin she’s not complaining.

*

The team is having a meeting to discuss her mental well being. They’re using phrases like ‘emotionally compromised’ and ‘blatant liability’ and she’s sitting in the rafters eating a ginger snap mechanically and couldn’t give less of a damn. 

*

She lies on the roof of the warehouse. “Ware-home,” Garfield corrected her after she slipped and called it the, “Ware-prison.” Its cold for summer, probably due to the ocean breeze and the sun sinking below the horizon. 

She watches as stars one-by-one peek into the night sky. In her imagination Wally is pressed to her side, his hand in her hair, his lips on her ear. Star-gazing had been his favorite hobby, he told her once that due to his super-speed he always felt like he was living ten times faster than everyone else. The world was boring and slow and all shades of gray to him. But watching the stars made everything else slow down. Star-gazing was one of his rare opportunities to allow the world to spin in slow motion as he meticulously catalogued the constellations.

“Orion,” he’d say, if he were here. “You pinned him to the sky.”

“Me?”

“Well, your namesake. The goddess, Artemis, not that you aren’t a goddess in your own right.” A cocky grin against her cheek. “She was challenged to a duel and accidentally shot her true love, Orion. In order to preserve his memory she made him into a constellation.”

“A constellation, huh? That’s not a bad memorial.”

Artemis stares at the star right above her head. The large vibrant star that she noticed in Bludhaven and every night since and never before.

“Its better than a hologram.”

*

She’s happy that Bart is wearing Wally’s suit, really. Its in honor of everything Wally stood for and Wally wanted him to wear it, dead or alive.

But it still bothers her because even though Bart is smaller than Wally had been in every sense of the word, even though his hair is a rusty brown where Wally’s had been vibrant and red, he looks like Wally. From behind or even from the front if she squints, he looks like Wally. When he runs, a yellow red blur in his wake, he looks like Wally.

He comes careening around a corner and Artemis stops cold, staring, and she knows Bart knows from the way he’s extra careful to keep his cowl down when they’re alone.

She calls him Wally by accident. Once. Bart holds her as she cries.

*

Most days she was fine. She could go through the motions without much fuss. Wake up, train, errands, train, eat, train, help Gar and Bart and the other kids with schoolwork, train, train until her arms felt like noodles, shower, sleep, repeat.

Then there were days when she’d find Wally’s sweater in her things and lie on her bed for hours, curled into the tiniest ball she could manage. In those moments she sometimes felt a touch, a whisper of a man who wasn’t there.

On one particularly bad occasion she was sparring with Nightwing, blanked, saw Nightwing’s fist rushing toward her face in slow motion, knowing neither of them could stop it. Just as the punch connected with the edge of her jaw she thought she heard a whispered shout, what sounded like a fragment of her name hurled from the receiver of a cellphone two hundred yards away.

She spent the rest of the day in the infirmary, M’gann patting her forehead with wet cloths as she raved that Wally needed her. That he was there. But it became quite clear quite quickly that Artemis was not to be believed. The others couldn’t feel him, couldn’t hear him, couldn’t sense his presence in a way that she was attuned to after five years together. She wouldn’t have given a damn for their opinion if she wasn’t so convinced she needed their help and resources to find him.

So even when M’gann left and the room was empty and Artemis was entirely certain she felt fingers entwine with hers, she didn’t say a word.

*

No one wants to help her fix this. That wasn’t to say none of them cared, they did, they cared when they found Wally’s Rocky Road in the back of the freezer, when they left dents in the walls and when they cried alone in their rooms. But they could live without him. 

Artemis supposes she could live without him too, but she doesn’t want to try.

*

She asks Bart on a cold rainy day as they sit on the pier if Wally was alive where he was from.

He scrunches his nose and folds himself over his can of soda. “Would it make a difference?”

Artemis shrugs. “Maybe.”

Bart looks up at her and smiles a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Maybe.”

*

It was one of those days where everything went wrong. A Tuesday afternoon. The entire team was fighting some ice villains who thought it a brilliant plan to collaborate, as if they had never watched the instant replay of their failed and miserable lives.

Artemis kept messing up, arrows spinning in the wrong directions, fingers fumbling with her bow string, feet barely keeping her upright, because even as ridiculously predictable ice villains were they were cold by nature, and the last time Artemis was cold Wally had vanished in a flash of electric light.

She isn’t paying attention. She thinks she hears Zatanna yelling for her but Z’s voice is distorted by the sound of an ice spear rushing toward her forehead.

Its then that Wally appears before her, naked.

*

It isn’t a sudden thing. The air in front of Artemis grows cold, colder, and then a wind whips her newly short hair round and round her head. The ice spear explodes in a thousand tiny pieces that settle on her cheeks like enthusiastic snowflakes.

Bart looks up from where he’s punching a goon in the face and runs around the team twice before settling beside her. Garfield perches on her shoulder as a green African Parrot. He squawks.

There are others, M’gann floating just behind her shoulder, Conner leaving an impressive dent in the sidewalk as he leaps to her side, Karen and Mal silently observing as they tie up the three or four ice villains they’ve captured. As the battle comes to a standstill all their attention is on Artemis.

But all Artemis sees are the tendrils of electricity pulsing from the smoky cloud before her.

Conner puts a hand on her shoulder, tries to pull her back, but Artemis pushes him away. 

She’s on her knees, reaching into the cloud. 

“--temis,” a voice resonates around her, on her, in her. “Artemis.”

“Wally?” she says. Her hand grabs something solid.

Its a shoulder. Artemis wraps both of her hands around it, she thinks she might be yelling for help, might be pulled backward by a firm arm around her waist, might be crying from the itching, pulsing light that emanates from the cloud, but she can’t be sure.

A moment later Wally is in her lap, naked, and she doesn’t let go even when his cheeks flush red and he whispers something about pants.

Someone, probably Zatanna, wraps a blanket around them both. Artemis keeps her arms firmly around Wally’s neck as he stands, she dangles against his chest. He holds her like a koala, clutches the comforter around his less than public bits and asks how long he’s been gone.

*

Two months, almost three, almost long enough for Artemis to completely lose her mind. 

*

Once they’re finally, mercifully, alone, he brushes her short hair from her eyes and says, “I love it.”

She can’t tell if he means her hair or just her, but she doesn’t care. She wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him like she’s dying, like he’s dying, like they have minutes to live. They very well could.

*

They talk about the furling, massive, living thing that is the Speed Force. They talk about finishing school. They talk about Brucely and ghostly fingers and sex.

They don’t talk about marriage until Wally is lying on the roof of the Ware-home with her on a particularly sweltering night. She’s wearing short shorts and a sports bra and Wally isn’t wearing a t-shirt, is lucky he’s wearing his pants at this point.

Wally never was one to wait for the perfect moment, he tended to put things off until the moment was so late it was expected or to rush into things without any planning involved whatsoever.

But there must’ve been planning involved because he has a ring.

He looks over at her, green eyes glimmering, says, “We really should go back to Paris one day.”

“Why?” Artemis says, but Wally’s already on a knee. She stands so fast she might have fallen off the roof if not for the unequivocal sense of balance she has when Wally is beside her. 

“Because I want to marry you there.”

She says, “Yes,” and then, “we should’ve done this a long time ago,” for good measure.

Wally laughs as he spins her. “No kidding.”

*

She’s never felt so free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please review :)

**Author's Note:**

> Nope. Not over Endgame yet. I might have to add a few more chapters to cure myself. Hope you enjoyed.


End file.
